Category: television

Quokkas, I really enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale. Both book and (2017) adaptation. (The ’80s movie is streaming on Stan – do we need a liveblog? Maybe we need a liveblog. But we’ll also need wine. I mean, I’ll need wine.)

One of the things I enjoyed is that, like a lot of Canadian science fiction — sorry, Margaret Atwood, speculative fiction — it leaves space in its worldbuilding for the rest of the world to exist. Even within the narrow confines of book!Offred’s perspective, we know that Japanese tourism and gender relations maintain the current status quo, or something close to it, and the wider perspective of the Hulu series gives us glimpses of Canada and Mexico.

Sometimes I wonder what that kind of extreme patriarchal dystopia would look like in Australia, given that we were colonised by Georgians and Victorians instead of Puritans.

And other times I wonder, well, while the USA has collapsed and Gilead has formed out of its ashes, what’s happening back home?

We’re three episodes into season 2 of Cleverman, which means it’s time to pop our heads up and see how it’s all going. Are the West brothers still handsome but awful (but not as awful as the white dudes)? Has it fixed its Women Problem? Are there still Significant Birbs?

This week’s Doctor Who episode (Liz liked it a lot! Especially Bill “greatest companion since the last one you really loved” Potts!) has a beat where the Doctor clears out a Sydney cafe by emerging from the toilets and shouting, “Shark attack!” For plot reasons, obviously.

But it’s frankly ridiculous that this ploy would work, so here are a couple of short listicles.

Big Little Lies is a bestselling 2014 novel by Australian author Liane Moriarty. It’s also a 2017 HBO series starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, which has sparked some interesting conversations about the value of women’s stories.

Commercial fiction isn’t a genre I usually read, but I was intrigued by the buzz around the TV show, so I bought the book, inhaled it and adored it, and then watched the TV series, about which I had/am having very mixed feelings.

Way back in 2013, one of my earliest posts on No Award was a look at the boys of Dance Academy. (Part 1 – Part 2.) I promised at the time that I would come back and write about the female characters as well … and now it’s 2017, the movie is released next week, I have a ticket to an advance screening tonight, and last night I finished my rewatch.

And let me tell you, quokkas, I have all the feelings. The female regulars of Dance Academy cover a whole lot of arcs and archetypes, from Tara’s need to be a fairy tale heroine, to Abigail’s evolution from ambitious and jealous queen bee to ambitious and highly professional queen. I love every single one of them, even Grace, who I also detest and loathe.

(This post is a lot shorter than the two I did about the boys. That’s not because they’re less interesting, or because I care about them less — I’m just much busier now than I was in 2013. Stupid real life.)

This Classic Who serial originally aired in 1966. I’m not sure when it hit Australia, but my dad watched it on the ABC as a child, and the Very First Regeneration (Hartnell to Troughton) made enough of an impression on him that he could describe certain scenes to us kids.

But because early television was ephemeral (and the BBC needed to reuse that tape a bunch of times and then burn it), the serial itself was lost. Only the audio track survived.

To celebrate the serial’s 50th anniversary, and to make a quick buck, the BBC has “restored” the video via animation, and the result has been given a limited cinema run.

I promised Stephanie that I’d watch SBS miniseries Deep Water over the weekend, and report back to No Award about (a) whether or not it’s worth watching, and (b) whether it contained any amazing/hilarious auscore.

Unfortunately, my plan hit the most Australian snag ever — my internet was too slow to stream the final two episodes via the SBS app. And I’m on the NBN. I mean, really.

(I was attempting to airplay to my AppleTV from my iPad — I might have had better luck hooking my laptop up to the TV, but I was like, come on, it’s 2016, we’re not animals here! Also, I have to rearrange half my living area to make a stable place for the laptop to sit, and it’s all a lot of effort when the series is just $9.99 on iTunes. Or $7.99 in standard definition, and let’s face it, it’s not like I have the bandwidth for HD or a TV that will do it justice.)

The fact that I’m going to pay money to finish the series probably answers question (a) — I was enjoying it, and found it a worthwhile way to spend a Saturday evening (but not enough to move my laptop). But Stephanie was probably expecting a proper post, and I guess that’s fair, so…